• problematicPanther@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      i dunno man, i started learning indonesian, that one is really really simple, or at least it is so far. the verb ‘is’ is pretty much always implied. plural? just say the same noun twice.

      and some of the words are awesome. For example. the word “sock” is “kaus kaki” which literally translates to ‘hand shirt’. i love it.

    • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think that English is that hard. It has very easy grammar, you don’t have to mess with genders and it has a straight forward sentence structure. Other languages like german, are much harder to learn.

      • CheesyFox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        yeah, i’m from Ukraine, and at some point our study program has tried to fit in our poor heads some A1-A2 german, so I can relate. Needless to mention that i can’t say a word in german, all knowledge of it has been forgotten by me as some kind of lovecraftian unspeakable horror :D

        • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          German is a hell to learn. The same word can have different articles depending on the kasus. As example: “Er geht in DIE Küche und kommt aus DER Küche heraus”. Its very hard to understand this as a non native speaker.

      • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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        1 year ago

        Again, the difficulty of language acquisition is determined by how similar the new language you are trying to learn is to the languages you already speak. There isn’t any kind of objective measurement of language acquisition difficulty.

        For whatever reason people are often very resistant to this fact, but just speaking several languages fluently doesn’t mean you actually know shit about linguistics, and this is a very well-established concept.

        So a native Mandarin speaker would probably find English and German equally difficult to acquire because they are both so unlike their own language.

        Fun fact about English; Old English was even more grammatically complex than modern German but it got stripped down over the years and now accomplishes through syntax much of what it used to do with grammar.

        There are also a couple of very odd qualities to English that may have come from the Celtic languages, but the idea is still pretty controversial.

        • kattenluik@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          I swear every single time someone mentions language or doesn’t explicitly say where they’re from someone will fight you saying that you only know one language and one culture and you can’t possibly know anything else lol

          • CheesyFox@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            well there are some stereotypes about americans, and there are also lots of people in the world that don’t know any languages other than their native ones, so I guess I can see where it’s coming from.

            • kattenluik@feddit.nl
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              1 year ago

              I’m more referring to where you say you obviously know more than just English, and someone tries to fight you about it. That only comes from bad intentions.

              • CheesyFox@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Whatever you call it, but to me it seems simply as a rather not so funny, but still a joke without any implied hostility. People are not as malicious as you think, untill it’s the matter of politics of course.

          • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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            1 year ago

            The problem is that speaking different languages is not even remotely the same thing as knowing anything about linguistics. People have no idea of how little they actually know about the use of language.

            • kattenluik@feddit.nl
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              1 year ago

              I’m honestly not sure about how people would go about learning a language without getting so involved that you inevitably catch all of that, I’ve never thought about it.

    • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Languages are “easier” or more “difficult” based on how similar they are to your native language. There isn’t some objective measure of difficulty across languages.